Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow (18 page)

But the lass didn’t write “at once.” She had
not
done what Tordis asked. She still had the little stub of candle and the matches. The candle had given her a rash and made her nose itch, and she had stuck the candle and
matches in one of the pockets she wore under her clothes. She supposed that she could use it at any time, but why? Tordis was convinced that she was in bed with a monster, but the lass was not so sure.

True, when she had asked Rollo to smell the hair she had found, it had carried a hint of troll. But he had also smelled bear and human, so it was hard to say which smell was more accurate. She herself smelled rather like bear, lately. And her nighttime visitor felt like a human. She had touched him, kicked him, and rolled against him by accident in her sleep. She thought that she would know if he were some hideous beast.

After lunch, she made up her mind to lie. She got out the little book and wrote to Jorunn:
Tell Tordis yes, and all is well.
There, the lass thought, that should soothe her sister for a time.

But then the guilt began to gnaw at her. She was lying to Tordis. And maybe her sister was right. Just because the back she had felt in the darkness seemed to be the back of a human man, that didn’t mean that it really was. And along with the magic that kept her from finding any candles or getting out of the room in the night, maybe there was an enchantment that made him feel human when really he was . . .

“A troll,” she breathed aloud.

As soon as the idea entered her head, it wouldn’t leave. This was a troll palace. Everyone raised in the North knew
that the trolls had magic, terrible magic, and they played with the lives of other creatures like dolls. After what had happened to Erasmus and the others, she knew that as well as anyone. How could she have been so foolish? For all she knew, she was lying beside the troll princess herself! Perhaps the feeling that she was lying with a young human man was there to reassure her while the princess did . . . what? Sucked out her soul slowly over the course of a year? Made herself young by aging the lass? The lass had a name, but she had never been baptized—how much protection did her name really provide?

She ran into her dressing room and studied her face in the mirror there, but couldn’t see any difference. Well, that wasn’t quite true. She did look a bit older, but that was probably just from having traveled so far and seen so much. Her face had rounded out, but that was thanks to good meals.

“Well, it’s not that,” she said aloud.

“What are you doing?” Rollo came into the dressing room.

“I just thought that . . .” She let the sentence trail. Rollo would only be upset by her suspicions that a troll shared her bed. He would want to protect her, but there was no way that he could. At midnight every night, a deep sleep came over him that lasted until dawn. Even when he fell asleep on her bed, her visitor lifted him off and put him by the sitting room fire. She suspected that her visitor
also hid the candles before climbing into bed, but he was so quiet that it was hard to tell.

“I thought I had a gray hair,” the lass said. “But it was just a trick of the light.”

“Hmmph. Vain” was Rollo’s comment.

By the time they went to meet the bear for dinner that night, the lass had made up her mind. She couldn’t continue to sleep beside someone—or something—that she had never seen. She knew it would be risky, so she made preparations.

After dinner, she filled her secret pockets to bursting with pearls and rubies and coils of gold wire thread. She packed her troll dictionary and clothing into the knapsack Mrs. Grey had given her. She begged food from the salamanders and they gave her bread, dried meat, cheese, and apples. As an afterthought, she attached Tova’s pack to her own knapsack with silk scarves. She laid the awkward bundle by the hearthrug where Rollo slept and told him to keep an eye on it.

“Why?”

“Never you mind, dog.” She put the candle and the matches under her pillow, and then she cleaned her teeth and slipped into bed.

She had worried that she would fall asleep and not wake up until after her visitor had gone, but that wasn’t a problem. She lay, rigid as a board, while her thoughts screamed at her: run, hide, run, hide!

She told herself over and over that she had done it for months, she could do it one more night. The memory of all those past nights curdled her stomach. She could not go on like this. She would look, and then in the morning, as soon as he? . . . she? . . . it? . . . left, she would grab her pack and Rollo and run home. It was possible that she would die somewhere in the forest or on the snow plain, but it would be better than having her life sapped away by a troll.

By the time the creature climbed into bed with her, she was vibrating like a fiddle string. When the weight of her nighttime guest hit the mattress, she almost bolted. Instead she gripped the edge of the blanket and concentrated on breathing deeply. This calmed her somewhat, and she was able to keep up the pretense of sleep until she heard a soft snore from her companion. She counted to fifty, just to make sure that it hadn’t also been feigning sleep, and then she fished the candle and matches out from under her pillow and slithered out of bed.

There were thick silk curtains all around the bed, and she stood outside these, counting to twenty to make sure that she hadn’t woken whatever it was. Her fingers shook so badly that it took three tries before she could get the wick lit. Then, cupping her free hand carefully around the flame, she crept around the bed.

Biting her lip, the lass parted the curtains and leaned into the bed to see what had been lying beside her all these months.

A man.

A handsome, young man. Dark hair, a fine straight nose, long eyelashes fanned on a smooth cheek. He looked older than the lass by a few years—perhaps he was twenty, twenty-one years old. He wore a linen nightshirt, and the collar was open to reveal a glimpse of smooth, muscular chest. The lass leaned over him, studying the planes of his face, but could see no flaw, no sign of a monstrous nature.

And then.

And then the burning wick reached one of the scented herbs Frida put in her candles. The herb sizzled, making the flame sputter. A little streamer of smoke curled up the lass’s nose.

She sneezed.

Hot wax dripped off the candle as the sneeze jolted through her body. It fell on the shoulder of the young man’s white nightshirt, and he woke. His wide eyes fastened on the lass’s. They were violet.

“Oh, no,” he breathed, an expression of horror creeping across his handsome face. “What have you done?”

“I only wanted to s-see what you were,” she stammered, backing away from the look on his face. “I thought that maybe—”

“One year and one day. You had only to endure one year and one day of my company. Bear by day, man by night, just like your brother. Tova failed too. They always fail. And then we have to go.” He shuddered and his eyes closed.

“Go where?” She could barely speak; a terrible coldness was coming over her.

“To
her
. I must marry her and live in her palace east of the sun and west of the moon.”

“But isn’t there any other way? Can’t I . . . do . . . something?” The cold was making her face numb, and her hands. She dropped the candle; the flame went out as it fell, plunging the room into darkness once more.

“If you had waited three more months—just three—I would have been free,” the young man said. “We both would have been free.” Then: “She comes!”

“Isbjørn!”
The lass called to him as the cold rose up and swallowed her. The wind rushed in her ears. She fainted.

The lass awoke to Rollo nosing her face and whining. Her head was pillowed on her bulging knapsack, and she was cramped and cold. Blinking the sleep from her eyes, she sat up and looked around.

“Rollo? Where are we?”

“I don’t know, and I couldn’t wake you for hours, and I didn’t dare leave you,” he whimpered. He lowered himself down until his upper half was in her lap, something he had not done since he was a puppy. “What happened?”

What had happened was that the palace had disappeared, the lass thought, looking around. She and her wolf were deep in a forest somewhere. Judging by the thickness of the trees, they were far from the ice plain. Or perhaps they were right in the middle of the ice plain, but the trolls had taken away the palace and replaced it with this forest as part of her punishment.

“I saw him,” the lass told Rollo. “I lit a candle, and I looked at him.”

“Who?” He raised his head and looked at her.

She looked off through the trees, but didn’t really see them. “I think he was a prince. He was so handsome. Our
isbjørn.
Every day he was an
isbjørn,
and every night he was human and lay beside me. If I could have gone one year and one day without looking at him, without being curious and asking too many questions, it would have broken the enchantment. But I looked, and now he’s gone.”

Rollo whimpered. “Gone where?”

“To a castle east of the sun and west of the moon,” she said, remembering the words as clearly as if they had been written on the inside of her eyelids. “To marry
her
.

“Hans Peter did this as well,” she continued after a long silence. “He was an
isbjørn,
and Tova was the girl who had to lay with him and not look. But she looked, too. I guess we always look.”

“But Hans Peter didn’t marry the troll, did he?”

“I don’t know.” She reached over to her parka, Hans Peter’s parka, which lay to one side of the knapsack. “But I think that Tova did this, this embroidery, to change the spell. She must have found this somewhere and done it, to help him get away.”

Another long silence. The lass was very cold, sitting in the snow in just her nightshift, but didn’t want to move. Finally a shiver took her unawares, and she sneezed. It reminded her of the sneeze last night, the sneeze that had
spilled the wax and woken the prince. She got to her feet and shucked off her wet shift.

Rollo scrambled to his feet and stared at her. “What are you doing?”

She opened up her knapsack and pulled out a clean shift, a heavy velvet skirt, and a vest of stiff brocade. “We’re going to find him,” she declared, dressing as quickly as she could.

“I did this,” the lass went on as she fastened the ties of Hans Peter’s parka. “I caused the deaths of Erasmus, Mrs. Grey, and Fiona. I caused the poor
isbjørn
”—a sob shook her—“
my isbjørn
, to be taken away, and now he’ll be forced to marry a troll. I caused it, and I’m going to fix it.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I never even knew his name,” she said in a whisper. “I should have asked his name.”

“All right,” Rollo said finally. “Which way do we go?”

“What’s east of the sun and west of the moon?”

“Nothing.”

“If it’s easter than east and wester than west, it must be north,” she reasoned. She was thinking of the globe from the library, the one she had recently hurled through a window. The top of the globe was a white disc of gleaming opal where her reading had told her “no man lived.” No man, perhaps, but trolls might.

“Or south,” Rollo interjected.

“But trolls don’t like to be warm,” the lass reminded
him. “So it must be north. The lands to the south are all deserts, like the one the salamanders came from.” That thought brought her up short. “The salamanders!”

“What? Where?” Rollo looked around in confusion.

“Not here,” she sighed. “What if everyone who was in the ice palace is dead now, because of me?”

Rollo gave an inarticulate whine.

“We have to stop this,” the lass said. “There will be no more deaths.” Her heart thudded. “And I don’t want
her
to have
him
.”

She began to march. A little while later the thought came to her that the servants wouldn’t be put to death just because she looked at the prince. Tova had looked, and the servants hadn’t been harmed. This cheered her, and she was able to walk in a faster rhythm.

When her legs screamed with fatigue and she was sweating beneath her parka, they stopped. Rollo went off after a rabbit whose tracks they had seen, while the lass ate some bread and cheese. She sucked handfuls of clean snow to quench her thirst. When Rollo came back, looking pleased and licking his chops, they went on.

For a day and a night and a day they walked, seeing no one. They came across a fox, and a wolf who could have been Rollo’s twin. The lass called out to them, but they sniffed at her and then ran.

“We smell of troll,” Rollo said, grim.

“It doesn’t matter,” the lass said, and walked on.

They traveled for another day, another night, and another day. The lass ate the last of the food the salamanders had given her, and was forced to stop and build a fire to cook the rabbits that Rollo caught. Every moment that she sat by her little fires, every time she lay down to sleep because her body could go no farther, her mind and heart raced, thinking of her lost companion and the horrors he might be facing. She would clamber upright as soon as she could, and march on.

After two weeks of this, as near as she could reckon, the lass expected any moment to come through a cluster of trees and find a fabulous palace. Perhaps of ice, perhaps of gold or ivory or silver, but gleaming and grand and dangerous, whatever it was built of. She felt certain that they must be nearing the top of the world, where the trolls’ palace simply had to be.

She did not expect, deep in the frozen woods, to find a weird little hut made of turf bricks with an old woman sitting in front of it, paring apples.

“
Morn’a,
” the old woman said cheerfully.

“
Morn’a, moster,
” the lass said politely.

“‘
Moster?
’” The crone cackled with glee. “I like that!
‘Moster!
’ No one’s called me
‘moster
’ in years!” She dropped her paring knife in her lap and slapped her thigh. “And I’m old enough to be your
moster’s moster’s moster’s
moster’s
moster,
besides!” She wiped tears from her eyes, still laughing.